This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.
This is where I fill up water for storage.
Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets.
So you can see the sediment from the data center.
Wow.
And that’s just from the water coming out of your faucet.
Yeah.
And this is what’s in all the pipes.
Just the well itself is probably $20,000.
And that’s not counting any of the other fixtures, replacement of the toilets and the lines that come underneath the house.
It’s overwhelming because you really feel like you are up against this huge wall that you can’t penetrate.
There’s nothing that you can do.
And they don’t care.
I’m here in Mansfield, Georgia, driving by Meta’s new 2 million square foot data center facility.
Facilities like this are being used to power things like ChatGPT and other AI tools that are becoming integrated into our daily life data centers.
Data centers, going to be a very hot item.
This entire supercomputer is built to power Grok.
We see data centers as the most exciting asset class Meta is building a two gigawatt plus data center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.
But data centers come with big costs, from light and noise pollution to the environmental impacts to the potential rising costs of energy bills.
These facilities put extraordinary demand on the power grid and require entirely new infrastructure.
Oh my God.
They should be responsible for that, not us.
Search the internet for profits that Meta has made, Amazon, Microsoft.
They can afford to pay for their own generation.
We came to Georgia to ask two questions.
What’s the true cost of the AI revolution and who should be paying for it? Your house is here and the data center is right there.
It’s less than 400 yards.
Beverly and Jeff Morris bought their home an hour’s drive from downtown Atlanta in 2016, but their roots in the community run much deeper.
Being in the country has always just been my piece and my therapy.
When we found this place, we decided that this was it.
It was perfect.
I was actually raised probably five miles from here.
This felt like coming home.
The data center that’s now the Morris’s next door neighbor happens to be owned by Meta, the company, you know for Facebook and Instagram, but has also been breaking into artificial intelligence.
They started construction on this data center campus in 2018.
Definitely changed everything.
They destroyed the environment.
Taken down all the trees across the road.
Beautiful pines, beautiful forest.
The light pollution is.
.
.
We don’t have to have a nightlight in the house.
You can walk around the house at night and see everything.
It’s that bright.
This is a video of the dust from Facebook, where the construction was.
What it looks like right now on my front door.
The wind blowing in all of this stuff from across the construction, across the road.
This is all from Meta.
Yeah, I was standing on my front porch.
I think eventually that affected our well water.
We’re on a well here and we started having issues with our well in 2018.
I have to replace a hot water heater.
I’ve replaced two washing machines and a dishwasher because of the sediment that’s coming in.
A lot of what the Morrises are facing is from the polluting effects of this massive construction, but that’s only one part of the story.
There are serious cost to communities once data centers are operational too.
To explain that, we have to back up for a second.
I wouldn’t blame you if you were asking yourself, what the heck is a data center anyway? Their origins date back to early, clunky supercomputers or mainframes in the 1950s and 60s.
And then in the 90s, with the birth of the internet, the modern data center was born as a way for internet providers to connect businesses and the world to the web.
In the 2010s, data centers became larger as they became critical to new cloud storage.
With the cloud, we share a single photo that allows us to all work at the same documents.
Everything from your pet photos to entire workplaces to files for video streaming – like this video you’re watching right now – were in the cloud.
Today, we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in processing needs as large as the birth of the internet.
Artificial intelligence.
A transformational moment for data center demand.
But the thing is, I processing demands are much larger.
One report showed that a Google search using a ChatGPT like AI feature used 30 times as much power as a normal Google search.
In the next three years, data center use of electricity is expected to double or even triple.
And the state of Georgia has the fastest data center growth in the entire country.
The two biggest reasons data centers come to Georgia are that electricity rates for industrials, which is the class that they’re in, are 42% below the national average.
And the second biggest one are data center tax breaks.
They received over $180 million in tax breaks last year.
The week we were in Georgia, a showdown was happening at the state Capitol over two bills tied to data centers.
Senator Hofstadter had proposed two different bills, and one of them was SB 34, which has the data centers bill to move the burden of the operational costs of data centers from ratepayers to the data center themselves.
That is the consumer utility Council, a legal advocate for ratepayers and small business.
Bills like these are the result of mounting residential anger and the work of dedicated advocates across the state, like Diana Dietz, who lives 50 miles away from the capital in Fayette County.
This is a huge industrial project plopped in a residential area.
This was the original plan.
122 acres.
And then the development authority got involved.
In 2022, officials in Fayette County voted to annex and rezone an additional 412 acres for a data center campus.
Fayetteville’s City Council voted 5 to 0 in favor of the development, despite passionate opposition from some local residents.
The site was then purchased by QTS, which is owned by Blackstone, for $153.
8 million.
These speculators, investors are secretly buying up land right next to homeowners.
And it was all done so that when we all went to the four public hearings between the county and the city, it was a done deal.
This is the one that’s currently under construction.
And this is where Jean and Joe are.
Jean and Joe Marschall live on the edge of Fayetteville in Fayette County on an eight acre property.
This driveway is almost the line for Fayette County versus Fayetteville, where QTS’s property is located.
We have absolutely no say in anything that happens over here.
Despite their vocal opposition to the project, living next to construction on all sides of their home has become their daily reality for the last two years.
They do nightly pours over here and in the back park at the other building.
The lights are shining and there is noise.
2:00, 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning so they don’t stop.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
We went to visit Niki Vanderslice, who heads up the Fayette County Economic Development Authority, a non-governmental agency that played a central role in the marketing of the land for data center development.
For residents who live alongside these data centers, life has become very difficult.
What do you say to them? Well, I say to them that there’s a couple of things.
One, we were very transparent.
The development authority was very open about attracting a data center, and there wasn’t any resistance until it came to their property specifically.
Vanderslice says data centers are good for the community, even if some don’t see the benefits yet.
In 2021, that property paid $36,000 in property taxes, total.
In 2024, on raw land, it paid $1.
13 million in property taxes.
That contributed $760,000 to our local board of education.
I’m apologetic that they’re being impacted, but I also see the benefits of what the companies are doing and how they’re how they’re improving our economy.
And so there’s the balance that when you have, you know, 200 out of 120,000 people you have to balance what’s what’s the highest and best use for the whole of the community.
It’s just the height of selfishness to imagine that one county’s benefit, to the huge detriment of 158 other counties in Georgia that now have to pay higher electric bills is okay.
It’s not okay.
It drives inequity.
It’s very immoral, too.
That’s Patty Durand, and as you can tell, she does not agree with Niki Vanderslice.
Patty is a long time consumer advocate and expert on energy policy, who’s been raising the alarm about rising costs of electricity related to data centers.
Our data center is going to drive up energy costs for residents across the state? On May 1st, Georgia Power residential ratepayers experienced a 24% rate increase.
Just since 2023, Georgia Power has raised rates six times.
And related to those rate hikes, remember those two bills we mentioned earlier? We were with Patty as she was watching a live feed of the Senate floor.
Today is Crossover day, which means any bill that does not get through one side of the House or the Senate to the other side is dead for the year.
And right now, Senate Bill 34 is not on that list.
By later that evening, both bills had failed to get a vote.
As disappointed and angry as Patty was, she wasn’t too surprised.
Georgia legislators are getting soaked with money from Georgia Power.
Is that a conflict of interest? Absolutely.
It is clearly corrupting.
This is the highest paid utility CEOs in the country.
Why is the poorest region in the country paying the most to our CEOs? $23 million.
$33 million.
It’s ridiculous how much money they make.
Our time in Georgia is crucial to understanding what’s happening all across the country, because the growth of data centers is not slowing down any time soon.
And tech billionaires have already been complaining about the amount of red tape involved in powering this growth.
Getting energy permitted is like a very heavily regulated government function.
And if you’re talking about building large new power plants or large build outs, that is just a heavily regulated thing.
The regulatory body in question is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, also known as FERC, an independent and historically nonpartisan agency that regulates interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil.
But just last month, President Trump signed an executive order placing FERC under white House control.
And he’s been boasting about his ability to fast track new projects.
We’re going to get very rapid approvals in the United States.
Like with the AI plans, under emergency declaration, I can get the approvals done myself without having to go through years of waiting.
With this alliance between the federal government, Silicon Valley and utility monopolies, who’s looking out for regular Americans like the Morrises? During the peak season our electric bill was maybe $250.
Yeah, yeah.
And now it’s probably $400.
Your electricity bill has doubled.
Wow.
It’s been a struggle.
Every month it’s a struggle.
Jeff would like to retire, but he keeps working because we have to pay our bills.
Do you think that people should have to pay more because of data centers? No.
Absolutely not.
They should pay for that difference.
It’s hard enough for a regular person to pay their electric bill as it is.
I don’t think that’s right at all.
We reached out to the big tech companies, including Meta, and QTS, asking for an interview and a tour of their facilities, but both declined to participate in the story.
Duran says despite the bill’s failure, the fight will go on.
A number of other states have similar bills up for debate right now.
The reason I think other states should pass it, whether we do or not, is that data centers could possibly come to their state next.
There needs to be legislation to protect them because by all accounts, data center growth is going to be very fast.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
